Scorio unrolled his bedroll. “That, and nothing bothers us because you’re here,” he said. “Perks of traveling with a Pyre Lady.”
“True enough.” Druanna’s smile was tight as she laid down her own roll. “But we’ll be at Nightsong Outpost within a few more days. Then it will be fine food, comfortable beds, and all the House politics you could desire.”
“I think I prefer the razor winds,” said Naomi, settling down.
“Me, too, these days. Still.” Druanna lay back, fingers interlaced behind her head. “I can’t get to the Lustrous Maria without the Nightsong nexus.”
Scorio sat on his bedroll. He’d yet to master Druanna’s ability to just go to sleep when she desired. “You think they’ll escort us into the Telurian Band?”
“Hmm, probably.” The Pyre Lady turned over. “I may no longer be House Kraken, but I still have some pull. Some old friends. If I ask politely, they’ll probably help you out.”
“Probably,” said Naomi.
“Probably,” agreed Druanna in amusement, then lay still.
Naomi glanced at Scorio, then also turned over to go to sleep.
Leaving him to sit alone in the dark. The vast canyon walls rose in all their ancient glory to tower high above them. To the far south a slight golden glow was just barely visible where the Telurian dawn was filtering just far north enough to be noticed.
The air was freezing. His breath puffed out before him, but the cold didn’t bother Scorio. Instead, he thought of Naomi and her burning desire to master his mana technique. Thought of the Blood Ox that awaited them in the Telurian Band. Thought of throwing themselves at the mercy of Kraken Great Souls once Druanna traveled far, far deeper into hell via the nexus.
What had been a workable plan no longer seemed like an obvious course of action.
So Scorio closed his eyes and rested his hands on his knees. He inhaled deeply, held the breath, then finally exhaled.
Somewhere out there was Nox.
His clutchmate, whatever that meant.
The Imperial Ghost Toad that had saved their lives.
“Where are you, my friend?” Scorio’s whisper was lost in the aching void of the valley. “Can you hear me? Answer if you can.”
And with great uncertainty, he opened his senses to the mana around him, and tried to reach out to the fiend.
Chapter 2
They traveled south.
The canyon never curved, and though its towering walls undulated subtly like the folds of a curtain, they neither veered nor deviated. The walls were never broken by intersecting canyons, and there were no buildings or geographical anomalies along the great southern route to the Telurian Band.
Just an endless flat ground between the distant canyon walls, pitted and corrugated, hard as the mana that flowed through the Iron Weald and as welcoming.
Behind them, the small sun of the Rascor Plains continued its endless circuit over the Farmlands, so that the northern reaches of their canyon seemed to flicker in contrast with the slow wellings of light from the south.
“We’re reaching the Dark Meridian,” Druanna told them on the second day after the razor wind. She hitched her pack as Scorio and Naomi caught up with her. “Means we’re almost exactly halfway through the Iron Weald.”
The Iron Weald had no natural source of illumination of its own. The Dark Meridian was only notable for being the point between the northern and southern lights, an area whose brightest moment was an evening gloom, and which most easily fell to night.
“Let’s push through quickly,” Druanna continued. “The entirety of the Iron Weald is dangerous, but this is where the most vicious of the fiends tend to spend their time.”
They marched on in silence.
Scorio brought up the rear, thumbs laced under the straps of his pack, face cast in a perpetual frown. He stared sightlessly at the leaden ground, his feet picking a path between the potholes and gashes, over the raised ridges and occasional tangle of needles.
Something pulled at him.
It was subtle. At first he’d simply thought himself fatigued, distracted, but with each step south his awareness grew. It was as if a weight lay heavy upon an invisible map of his mind, a density that he couldn’t understand or analyze.
His mind worried at it. Sought to draw it forth, to manipulate it as he did mana, to question it, to dismiss it.
Nothing worked.
The further south they went, the more persistent the sensation became.
Could it be Nox? He wanted to scoff at the possibility. But why not? For two nights he’d reached out blindly for some sense of the fiend. Perhaps his range was limited, and he was drawing closer.
Or perhaps it was a trap. Some fiend that used this very mechanism to draw unwary Great Souls closer.
Druanna, when asked, was equally mystified.
“We’re a good six or seven canyons clockwise from the Fury Spires canyon complex. Too far for you to be feeling something from there. And I don’t sense anything strange.”
Naomi watched him, curious, half-hopeful, but as the hours rolled by she, too, dismissed the notion.
Scorio trudged on. He missed the variety of the Rascor Plains. The endless parade of wonders and geographical novelties. Here, all was melancholic massiveness, given to inhuman scale and cold indifference to their sensibilities. Grim and dark and endless, the canyon’s high walls were oppressive.
Humans were never meant to walk such cyclopean halls.
“Now that’s a rare sight.” Druanna had come to a stop, and Scorio emerged from his reverie. It had grown dark, reducing his two companions to shadows. The canyon walls had lost all detail, and the far southern end of the canyon faded into the oblivion of a Telurian night. The ground before them had risen slightly, and the Pyre Lady was perched atop the rise, half-turned.
Scorio blinked. A rise? That was a first. He scrambled up the leaden rock slope. It was cracked like the parched bottom of a riverbed, and ended at a sharp tear that dropped away into complete darkness.
A second canyon cut crosswise through their own. Narrow in comparison, perhaps only a hundred yards across, and impossible to tell how deep.
But a frayed web of calcified metal had been sketched across it, a delicate latticework of rust and iron. Fingers of leaden stone stretched toward each other from each side, as if yearning to touch.
“What is this?” asked Naomi. “I thought you said there was no way to cross from one canyon to the next.”
Scorio looked to the sides. This new lateral canyon cut across the flat floor and dove just before the base of the distant cliff.
Druanna was smiling. “There normally isn’t. At least, not by any predictable means. But occasionally a traveler will stumble across one of these.”
Scorio frowned. “This wasn’t here before?”
Druanna didn’t bother answering.
“Then…” He almost spoke his mind, but the scale of what they were looking at caused him to balk. “No.”
“Yes.” Druanna laughed. “It’s a pity we’re several weeks too late. I’ve never seen a World Worm myself. But they do occasionally rise close enough to the surface to carve these furrows and create tunnels like this.”
“Then…” Naomi’s normal laconic tone was gone. “But how come the canyons aren’t riddled with these furrows? Are those metal threads…?”
“Not threads,” said Scorio, moving along the ridge to where a great pylon of rusted steel emerged from the rock to extend out over the darkness. “That’s a whole mess of iron. Is it from the razor wind?”
“The Iron Weald heals itself,” agreed Druanna. “The razor wind patches over any destruction, and the stone itself seals in time. Some have theorized that there’s an intelligence to this layer of hell, that it corrects any attempt to change it much as our bodies heal cuts and wounds. I think it’s just mindless mana acting like a river, eroding all differences.”
“Lianshi would love this,” said Scorio, and then shared a glance with Naomi as he felt a pang of pain.